The Fight for Seattle's Waterfront
Local property owners gather to fund a massive grain elevator, attempting to pull trade away from Tacoma and modernize the Seattle shipping industry.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The project for the building of a grain warehouse and elevator on the barrel factory site in South Seattle was taken up by property owners at a meeting at the Bellevue Hotel, where about 100 representative citizens were present. The general public is being asked to subscribe for $40,000 of stock in the company. C. G. Austin explained that Seattle must secure the wheat shipping business to compete with Tacoma, which had loaded forty-seven cargoes that season, spending over $300,000 in outfitting and supplies. By building the proposed house, they would ensure the location here of one of the largest grain firms on the Coast. The proposed Seattle Elevator and Shipping Company will occupy a 800x140 foot site. The capital stock is to be $200,000, and $140,000 remains to be raised in Seattle. If the city raises that amount, the elevator is an assured fact.
“To build up the city they must have the foundation right on the ground and not in the air, where they had tried to put them in boom times.”
This meeting reflects the early 'growth machine' mentality that defined Seattle’s development. The civic pressure to raise capital to compete with a rival city is a precursor to the modern, often aggressive, public-private partnership models used to build major infrastructure projects in the Pacific Northwest today.
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